Interview of Prof. Wissam El-Hage and Dr. Marc Legrand on the treatment of PTSD by TMS

TMS: New treatment option for PTSD

4 years ago, researchers at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) were among the first in the world to perform TMS on mice with the Cool 40 Rat Coil specifically designed for TMS on rodents. Their goal was to take a vital step towards finding new treatment options for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“We expect to make useful findings for the practical application of TMS for treating depression and PTSD”. Those were the words of Professor Wissam El-Hage when he and his research team members sat out to examine how TMS could be applied in mouse models of PTSD. 4 years down the road, the researchers have completed the study involving 155 mice and the results were recently published in the journal “Brain Stimulation”. We have asked Dr. Marc Legrand who was a prominent part of the research team if the initial expectations have been met and if he thinks it will be possible to find an effective TMS protocol for the treatment of PTSD in humans.

Relevance of new cortical targets

“The studies carried out in mice provided useful insights on the application of rTMS in humans for the treatment of depression and PTSD. The experimental findings obtained in mice models of depression and PTSD allowed us to better characterize neurobiological mechanisms at play following chronic rTMS treatment and underlines the relevance of new cortical targets,” says Marc Legrand whose main objective for doing TMS research was to further the efficacy of TMS in humans and define new cortical targets that could prove relevant in the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders and continues:

“The fundamental mechanisms at play in the therapeutic efforts still remains poorly understood even though TMS has been widely used and studied in the past decades”. [Read more]